'Thank-You Bar' show points to life's inexplicability

Johnson's odd little mystery play/dance/narrative may not be explicable (it does have moments of humor), but we can try to describe pieces of it as experienced on opening night.

The audience of no more than 30 milled around a visual art display in Out North's gallery featuring work by Native American artists with the collective title, "This is Displacement." Of particular interest is perhaps the first Alaska screening of a movie titled "The Snaring Madman" by award-winning Barrow Filmmaker Andrew Okpeaha MacClean. Johnson herself has work in the show, a series of frames with colored sand and paper stained with what may be her own blood.

At showtime, we were led into the theater. Those who went first got chairs. The rest sat on cushions. Musician Joel Pickard came out, created a sound on his pedal steel committed it to a computer loop and departed. James Everest then came out, did the same thing on his guitar, and departed. They alternated thusly for about 10 minutes until a cloud of layered strings, percussive and vocal elements filled the space.

Now entered Johnson from the back of the theater. Those seated on the cushions really couldn't see what she was doing. It sounded very gymnastic. We stood, but by then she was on the floor and still invisible.

A video followed of her entering the same room, using a recorder strapped to her chest to tell the story of what was here before it was a library or theater, which she illustrated using just her eyes with comic effect.

She alternated storytelling with dancing, a choreography that I can't say I've seen before. It's simultaneously graceful and violent, snapping arms, quick bends that keep the legs straight while slapping the floor with the palms of her hands, moves that may be mime, but seem utterly abstract as they buzz by.

She performed a solo waltz while the musicians (who play as a band, Blackfish) played "Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue," and sang "I Fall to Pieces" with them before they all spun off in a balletic pas de trois.

She brought out a container of lit paper boxes in a rough "igloo" shape and handed out the boxes to the crowd, sort of making us the "igloo." She had us all move from one end of the theater to the other, where she sat in a plastic kiddie pool filled with leaves and recounted her cousin's frustrated attempt to study blackfish.

And that's where it ended. The whole thing lasted one hour, but in recalling it 50 minutes later, it seems impossible that so many vivid, original and engrossing images (I've mentioned less than half of what transpired) could have fit into that time frame.

If there's a message -- and that's hypothetical -- it may be that art, experience, survival and life in general are as impossible to analyze as the blackfish. In the final analysis, we're all mystified.

Find Mike Dunham online at adn.com/contact/mdunham or call 257-4332.